Design and Verification of a 5G RAN Emulator for O-RAN

As the widespread deployment of the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) continues, increasingly complex applications and special-purpose AI/ML algorithms are being proposed. To efficiently and effectively evaluate the performance of such applications/algorithms, it is essential to use a 5G RAN emulator. This paper presents a 5G RAN emulator developed in Python. With the implemented emulated environment configurator, mobility model, link calculation model, traffic model, and resource scheduling model, the designed RAN emulator is a highly efficient tool for researchers to cost-effectively and time-efficiently evaluate the performance of complex applications/algorithms over the 5G RAN. The A3 event handover mechanism is implemented as an xApp and deployed in the Near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (Near-RT RIC) to validate the interoperability of the designed RAN emulator with the Open RAN (O-RAN). By analyzing the performance metrics reported from the designed RAN emulator, the A3 event handover mechanism issues control messages to steer traffic in the designed RAN emulator under the two selected mobility models, commuting and random walk modes. The experiment results show that the designed 5G RAN emulator can be perfectly integrated with the Near-RT RIC to validate the performance of xApps developed for specific use cases.